Step Right Up and See This Ghastly Town

Cory Oldweiler reviews Ecuadoran author Natalia García Freire’s new novel, “The Carnival of Atrocities,” translated by Victor Meadowcroft.

By Cory OldweilerApril 11, 2025

• Fiction

I RECENTLY WATCHED Peter Weir’s classic 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock for the first time. Widely regarded as one of the pillars of Australian cinema, the movie tracks the aftermath of a girls’ school outing on Valentine’s Day in 1900, when three students and one of their chaperones disappear in the crags of the titular geological formation, a majestic yet forbidding array of soaring outcroppings north of Melbourne. The disappearance comes to dominate the lives of those left behind, and even after one of the girls is found (though she has no memory of what happened to her), the survivors struggle to recover and move on.

Reading up on the film, I was unsurprised to learn that it had tangentially influenced the television series The Leftovers, another iconic exploration of how we process catastrophic loss. The show, which ran from 2014 to 2017, follows survivors of the supernatural “Departure,” which caused two percent of the world’s population to vanish in an instant, as they deal with the disappearance of their loved ones by questioning, upending, intensifying, or completely redefining their conception of faith.

There are countless such stories, of course, but these two specifically came to mind while I was reading Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire’s 2022 novel A Carnival of Atrocities, now translated into English by Victor Meadowcroft. The book is a marvel of creative fire that takes uniquely unexpected turns, yet it has parallels with both Hanging Rock and The Leftovers in that its drama centers on the unexplained disappearance of several people, who wander off toward “the crag,” while those left behind reexamine and ultimately reinvent their faith. (A quick Google search revealed that García Freire actually started watching The Leftovers a couple of weeks before I wrote this review. On March 7, 2025, she posted on X: “Llego tardísimo, pero The Leftovers me está destrozando. O siempre estuve rota. Quién sabe,” which loosely translates to “I’m extremely late, but The Leftovers is destroying me. Or I was always broken. Who knows.” No word on whether or not she’s seen Hanging Rock, but I think she’d love it.)

García Freire’s novel is set in the “old and vanished town” of Cocuán, where nothing “is what it seems,” and the book is narrated by a succession of townsfolk, starting with Mildred Capa and ending with her son, Filatelio. These voices relate how a handful of locals wander off into the woods one day and detail the fiasco that results when a search party tries to retrieve them. In the first chapter, Mildred is essentially orphaned, after her ma dies and her pa runs off, and then martyred, when she is dragged from her home and taken to live in the town monastery, where Father Santamaría rapes her and leaves her to waste away. Over the course of the novel, Mildred’s story gives rise to what is essentially a new religion. She was never baptized, despite the efforts of the town, but was instead “blessed by the water.” Her body is covered with sores, and she’s a bit of an odd duck, bringing her family’s three pigs into the house to live with her after her pa leaves. Many of her criticisms of Cocuán, which her ma hated, focus on the way its residents try to hide their true selves: the women “would mask their scent with perfumed talcs they bought by the kilo at the town pharmacy,” while the men “smelled of cheap Franja Negra cologne.” She despises Santamaría because he “didn’t know how to look or listen.”

When she is snatched from her home, Mildred has a premonition of future events, many of which deal with what to her mind is the misplaced faith of Santamaría’s flock—believers who have “the wills of slaves. Look at the men and women created by the Word.” She even prophesies some of the new credos—e.g., “Those who live in fear will become savages,” “Living flesh is very wicked”—that will animate the uprising that occurs in her name. And perhaps she even shares these slogans with her son or the few visitors she receives at the monastery before she dies.

Mildred is steadfast in her determination to resist Santamaría’s attempts to indoctrinate her, a resistance the translator captures using rhythmic repetition, a combination of anaphora and epistrophe: “I did not speak, he became irritated”; “I did not listen, he became irritated”; “I did not eat, he became irritated.” Throughout the novel, Meadowcroft repeatedly makes decisions that keep readers grounded in the world of the story, retaining Spanish phrases like “veranillo del niño” instead of the distractingly anglophone “Indian summer.” Similar benefit derives from explaining rather than translating “chulco,” the gamelike system of loan and collection that is “a kind of birthright” in Cocuán, and the decision not to translate “tontos” (Spanish for fools), which allows Meadowcroft to keep García Freire’s subsequent discussion of the word’s derivation from the Latin “attonitus.” The novel is also replete with references that situate the reader in the Ecuadorian biome, with forests of the high-altitude succulent frailejones, references to the Andean walnut toctes, and loads of native flora such as quishuar trees and chuquiraguas. García Freire’s imagery, effectively rendered by Meadowcroft, is also incredibly evocative, such as the wonderfully eerie description of the corpse of Mildred’s ma feeling like “the substance cold is made of.”

Mildred is the omphalos of the novel, and everything that happens after the first chapter evolves out of her fate, which is perhaps why the novel’s original Spanish title, Trajiste Contigo El Viento (“You Brought the Wind with You”), focuses on her role in the story. That title derives from Mildred’s ma telling her that when she was born, her appearance coincided with “a tepid wind, a wind that isn’t scared, a wind that takes refuge among piles of hay and rests down wells, emerging later to softly touch the flowers and make them open, before filtering through the tunnels in leaves where it remembers that it’s wind because it whistles.” In a lovely poetic touch, readers are never directly told that Mildred dies, only that her name becomes “a hollow whisper, a wind of stale air that doesn’t whistle.” The wind is referenced nearly 50 times in the 100-plus pages after Mildred dies, making her a constant qualifier of what happens in her absence. Among these many references, two stand out as highlighting the rebellion of non-Christians such as Mildred: first, when a wicked character beats the brother he has always seen as having “the bleeding heart of Christ,” the wind is described as “fearsome”; and later, when the last members of the rescue party finally reach the cave where the disappeared have sheltered, we are told that the ensuing violence “all started with the wind.”

The novel’s English title, by contrast, puts the reader’s focus on the town and, specifically, its residents. The phrase comes from something that Ezequiel, the character who beats his brother, says in the novel’s second chapter: “The carnival of atrocities that is Cocuán was stranger than ever. People would have paid good money to see us: step right up and see this ghastly town.” All the subsequent narrators come from those townsfolk left behind, many of whom were involved in evicting Mildred or burning down her home. In addition to Ezequiel, these other narrators include his twin brother, Víctor; a trio of survivors, Agustina, Manzi, and Filatelio; and three who are dead by the end of the novel, Carmen, Baltasar, and Hermosina. (I suppose technically that last bit is a spoiler, but this novel is not about who does what but rather what is done, so any knowledge of specific fates has no bearing on the unfolding of the story, whose beauty and entrancement lies in its telling.)

Many of the townies have loose correspondences with biblical figures, most notably Mildred, who wears a dress of “sky blue” like Mary, and Ezequiel and Víctor, who call to mind Jacob and Esau. The twins’ conflict began even before they were born, with Víctor feeling frightened in the womb. As he relates in his chapter, told entirely in direct address to himself: Ezequiel “started threatening you even before opening his eyes, looming over you while, huddled, you buried your chin between your knees and brought your elbows in together, trying not to touch his cold skin.” Víctor continually invokes the power of God and is the most determined of the seekers, driven by his desire to reunite with his father, one of those who leaves Cocuán. Ezequiel has always been told he is “feebleminded” but sees himself more as his brother perceives him, violent and with a “world of fury” before his eyes. Ezequiel not only savagely beats Víctor but also kills a baby fox and longs to punish the Solina sisters—Mercedes, Esther, and Hermosina. Like other so-called “fools” in the novel—several of whom end up inheriting the earth, as it were—Ezequiel is more perceptive than he would seem, noticing that, even long after Mildred’s death, her house smells “of fresh grass and rain,” while the rest of the town “reek[s] of dirty water and grime.”

Another duo whose narratives make for dramatic contrast is Agustina and Manzi. The former is a healer who makes potions that prevent some of the local women from getting pregnant by their abusive husbands, while the latter is the successor to Santamaría, who tells him: “Use the savagery of these people to your advantage, Manzi. They are capable of seeing miracles where none exist. They are the class of believer we spend our whole lives searching for.” Agustina is scathing in her critique of Christianity: “The difference is that you don’t even suspect that you’ve been trained to parrot the same thing over and over again: conceived without sin, conceived without sin. It’s fair and necessary, fair and necessary.” She admonishes “those who have ears to hear, let them hear,” and later says that, “if you listen carefully, everything speaks,” while an enraptured Manzi goes so far as to cut off his ears with a machete and give them to Agustina to carry around. In the end, however, both will profess devotion to the message of Mildred.

Baltasar and Hermosina are also set up in opposition. Baltasar is a kind of usurer, intent only on collecting the debt owed to him by “all the missing,” though even he levels a brutal sideswipe at misguided faith when he says, “Fear is an old man in sandals who fondles children while everyone else is praying” (which can’t help but evoke the abuse scandals that rocked established religions in recent years). Many men in Cocuán, like too many men in our own world, are abusive and smug, which Baltasar attributes to the fact that they “feel chosen, and there’s nothing better than feeling yourself chosen by God and heeding his call.” For Hermosina, however, these men are simply justifying aberrant behavior with pious claims: “Is God being just when he allows men to do disgusting things to women?” She knows firsthand of what she speaks, having been abused by Baltasar, who had her “put on the faded white panties of a little girl.”

The novel as a whole is an almost biblical tale of comeuppance about a city wiped clean off the face of the earth due to its wicked, wayward ways. Baltasar even expresses such a belief in righteous vengeance, saying of the disappeared that “we were sure that, the moment we grabbed them, it would all be over and we could return to Cocuán, as ancient peoples had so often done after God commanded everything be destroyed.” What he refuses to or can’t see is that Cocuán doesn’t deserve saving. Baltasar is “enraged at God and the devil because neither had saved our town.” But those who survive to start over have rejected, discredited, and mocked the perverted Christianity practiced by townsfolk like Baltasar, and even acknowledged by Santamaría, with all his faults, when he tells Manzi the townsfolk are deluded and savage. Among the survivors, who will “live on” to attest to the way things were in Cocuán, are another victim of Santamaría’s abuse and two young children fathered by men who never had any interest in caring for them.

It’s debatable at the end whether Agustina and Filatelio are necessarily better stewards of civility and charity than other residents of Cocuán, as Filatelio is already referring to himself and the other followers of Mildred, whom he calls Diosmadre, as “the chosen,” the same words that Baltasar had used. Maybe Agustina and Filatelio are opportunists who used the sorrow born of the disappearance to achieve their laudable and necessary goal of destroying both the men and the culture that ruined the lives of Mildred and so many other women. This desire to burn it all down and start over is incredibly contemporary (and oh so appealing at times), as are many of the critiques that undergird the novel’s fable-like, timeless narrative. What ultimately exonerates Filatelio and the others who rebel in Mildred’s name, however, is that they aren’t seeking to build themselves up as everlasting: they know they are just a stop along the way, a means to ensuring that “Cocuán does not appear on any map.” The details of the journey are of interest to those who “paid good money to see” A Carnival of Atrocities—or Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Leftovers—but for those who have experienced the trauma of loss, all that really matters is the destination.